“And heardst thou why he drew his blade?
    Heardst thou that shameful word and blow
    Brought Roderick’s vengeance on his foe?”—­Scott, L. L., C. v, st. 6.

[247] Better, as Wickliffe has it, “the day in which;” though, after nouns of time, the relative that is often used, like the Latin ablative quo or qua, as being equivalent to in which or on which.

[248] It is not a little strange, that some men, who never have seen or heard such words as their own rules would produce for the second person singular of many hundreds of our most common verbs, will nevertheless pertinaciously insist, that it is wrong to countenance in this matter any departure from the style of King James’s Bible.  One of the very rashest and wildest of modern innovators,—­a critic who, but for the sake of those who still speak in this person and number, would gladly consign the pronoun thou, and all its attendant verbal forms, to utter oblivion,—­thus treats this subject and me:  “The Quakers, or Friends, however, use thou, and its attendant form of the asserter, in conversation.  FOR THEIR BENEFIT, thou is given, in this work, in all the varieties of inflection; (in some of which it could not properly be used in an address to the Deity;) for THEY ERR MOST EGREGIOUSLY in the use of thou, with the form of the asserter which follows he or they, and are countenanced in their errors by G. Brown, who, instead of ’disburdening the language of 144,000 useless distinctions, increases their number just 144,000.”—­Oliver B. Peirce’s Gram., p. 85 Among people of sense, converts are made by teaching, and reasoning, and proving; but this man’s disciples must yield to the balderdash of a false speller, false quoter, and false assertor! This author says, that “dropt” is the past tense of “drop;” (p. 118;) let him prove, for example, that droptest is not a clumsy innovation, and that droppedst is not a formal archaism, and then tell of the egregious error of adopting neither of these forms in common conversation.  The following, with its many common contractions, is the language of POPE; and I ask this, or any other opponent of my doctrine, TO SHOW HOW SUCH VERBS ARE RIGHTLY FORMED, either for poetry or for conversation, in the second person singular.

   “It fled, I follow’d; now in hope, now pain;
    It stopt, I stopt; it mov’d, I mov’d again. 
    At last it fix’t,’twas on what plant it pleas’d,
    And where it fix’d, the beauteous bird I seiz’d.”
        —­Dunciad, B. IV, l. 427.